I have a helper box 192.168.2.8 and two primary boxes 192.168.2.4 & 192.168.2.5. I have configured the two primary boxes identically (as far as I can tell) with the exception of their differing ips. From 192.168.2.5 I can run emerge and it distributes to the helper box and everything works fine. However, from 192.168.2.4 I try the same thing and I get:

Technically --show-hosts and --get-hosts did return rolla instead of 192.168.2.8, I just didn't want to confuse matters, but hostnames are easier to type.

Is there any way to get any more debugging info into the log files? On schatzi I have the logging level set on debug in /etc/conf.d/distccd, and I set $DISTCC_VERBOSE=1. Still this is all I get in /var/log/distcc.log on schatzi after trying to install python-exec:

Sorry if this isn't helpful, but I'm curious if you actually tried setting the IP and not the hostname.
e.g.

Code:

export DISTCC_HOSTS=192.168.2.8 && emerge python-exec

You indicated you exported that variable, but then later stated:

Quote:

Technically --show-hosts and --get-hosts did return rolla instead of 192.168.2.8

I don't know how the hosts file could be correct but still resolving rolla to 127.0.0.1 but for the sake of testing
figured why not suggest actual IPs if you hadn't already.

The distcc man page says it checks, in order, $DISTCC_HOSTS > $DISTCC_DIR/hosts > global hosts. But I
also just tested one of my boxes by making sure to unset DISTCC_HOSTS then moving /etc/distcc/hosts and
I received "Warning: no hostlist is set; can't distribute work" so it didn't even pull 127.0.0.1 from my global
hosts file.

Odward, thank you for your suggestion. After switching user to root (su), I executed the command string you provided, and it worked. But then I thought, I just changed two things: (1) changed user (instead of sudo), and (2) exported DISTCC_HOSTS as ip. So I restarted, switched user to root, and executed the emerge command alone after verifying that both distcc --show-hosts and distcc-config --get-hosts returned: rolla and that worked as well. So there is something about my user environment. I noticed earlier today that the configuration of the PATH variable in .bashrc is different between the two primary boxes. Maybe I'll just start with a fresh .bashrc and see how that goes. It is too late tonight to try. I'll report back tomorrow after I've experimented.

Thanks for the help. At least I have a scenario that works now. I just need to work toward getting sudo emerge from my user to work.

I suspect it may be due to the groups that my user is a member of. I will be checking on that in a while and report back. For now I am performing a long overdue upgrade of schatzi, now that I can at least use distcc as root.

There really needs to be a list of all the places where one can define hosts. This is the second time I'm doing a fresh distcc set-up and once again I've been caught out by the arcane number of config flags and environment variables that need to be set up and that are already set up by default.

Thanks for the mention of /etc/distcc/hosts. I also had localhost in there that I did not desire.